For a time, it looked as if Stephen King would never reach retirement age. Nine years ago, a pickup truck slammed into him on the side of a Maine road. One of his legs shattered, a lung collapsed, several ribs broke and his hip fractured. A few years later, after developing a severe case of pneumonia, the king of chills decided to embrace warmth. "It's the law," he jokes from his part-time home on the Gulf Coast. "You get a little bit older, and you have to move to Florida." So, in one of the rare cliché moments of his life,...